D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[Remathilis]

I think a lot of settings could benefit from just a short sidebar about what a 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. level character means in that setting.

Ideally, they should mean the same thing in every setting. It's not like level progression or monster challenge ratings change with settings.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What the game has isn't the relevant bit. What the world has is important.

If you don't think what the game does here matters as much to many people as what the world avowedly says should happen, I'm afraid I have to disabuse you. There's a constant refrain in many places how out of sync a set of game elements is to the game fiction for the world involved.

Perhaps it seems so, to you.

I have every reason to believe its not "just me".

 

[Chaltab]

Ideally, they should mean the same thing in every setting. It's not like level progression or monster challenge ratings change with settings.

It does say something about the nature of the setting how rare it is to find a high level character. In some settings like Eberron high level characters are very rare and being level 15 means you're likely the strongest exemplar of your class for leagues... meanwhile in say Exandria, there's an entire city full of clerics and the Forgotten Realms has Thay where minions like Sofina have 9th level spells.

 

[Umbran]

I have every reason to believe its not "just me".

Dude, we are not engaged in a battle for the soul of gaming.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Dude, we are not engaged in a battle for the soul of gaming.

No, but since I'm usually talking about what I think gamers as a group think (and when I'm not, I try to make that clear), you're going to see me do this every time, and if its annoying, that's as it is.

 

[Sorinth]

Ideally, they should mean the same thing in every setting. It's not like level progression or monster challenge ratings change with settings.

Level progression can be different between settings if you don't use XP levelling. And the rarity of high CR monsters will vary between settings. A low magic setting without any class restrictions for players might for example use a slow level progression framework to keep player magic levels in-line with the low magic world, and as a result high CR creatures will be very rare. In this world getting to say level 11 will make you one of the most powerful people in the setting. Whereas another setting might have knights riding dragons as very common and those knights are all level 11+ so a PC becoming level 11 isn't really impressive to the rest of the world.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Outside of a few super-specific campaign elements outside their respective settings (Dragonmarks in Eberron, Dark Gifts in Ravenloft) I don't ban things unless they are broken. I have long championed the kitchen sink and find it a profound lack of creativity if you can't even fit the PHB in your setting. I find large ban lists a red flag that the GM is going to be overbearing and we probably won't mesh well.

More or less the same thing here.

That says nothing about what the GMs who use them think, however.

Your answer indicated that getting a list was supposed to be evidence of those three things--coherency, distinctiveness, shapefulness--when they are not evidence of that in the first place. At best, they're orthogonal. Hence, if you are now saying that that perception can exist solely in the mind of the GM, then the ban list is not actually evidence of the thing, and thus my question remains unanswered.

Well, see my final comment in the post two up. What GMs think they're doing, and what they're actually doing aren't necessarily the same thing.

I mean, you don't need to convince me of that. I'm already very intensely aware of the problem of GMs thinking action X promotes behavior A, when in actuality action X reduces behavior A. And various other quite similar things, e.g. prioritizing design that "looks pretty" (what I have previously called "meta-aesthetics") over design that actually works well even if it doesn't make good reading on the page or produce a beautiful, symmetric lattice etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When I was first researching Dragonlance, I identified at least 2 periods in the setting's history where divine casters either lost their powers or simply disappeared off the planet. One of these periods precedes the most popularly played section of Dragonlance history, the War of the Lance. Divine casters eventually return due to specific events during War of the Lance.

I think WOTC realized that telling people they can't play divine casters is not ideal. When SOTDQ came out, they added "a god visits you in a dream and now you have powers" as an option in a War of the Lance scenario that otherwise doesn't address that original storyline of how divine casting was restored.

There's also the Wizards (Mages) of High Sorcery, who offer an interesting challenge...but only for your arcane caster. There was never a gameplay element added for other classes that might mimic that experience and make those players also feel like they are part of the setting.

But as a +1 for Dragonlance, it has an amazing canon artifact called the Graygem, which allows you to put any species you want into the setting by saying some group of people were transformed by the Graygem.

It occurs to me, you could potentially get proper dragonborn (rather than draconians) by having a group of rebel draconians get their hands on the Greygem and wish for "a life of our own, free from the way we were born" or the like. They are dragonkin reborn--hence, dragon-born, not dragon-hatched.

 

[Hussar]

Why would players make their characters in a vacuum?

This has never happened in one of my games in the last 30 years. I provide the character generation document. I am usually pretty generous and give extra options.

Do I restrict some species options? Yes. I do not allow Warforged, for example.

I have a session zero although never called it that. The players have a discussion with me and the other players about what to play and what may fit with the rest of the group. It is always a discussion.

I have even built options for players who want something different.

If people are showing up with some random character and not discussing and interacting with the group, then something has gone wrong.

Must be nice.

In 30 years of gaming, I have seen people come to the table with fully formed characters virtually every single time. I get questions about "What is permitted in the campaign? What is the campaign about (maybe)?" and then the players invariably show up with fully formed characters. And, I would point out, that this has repeatedly been shown in a number of other poster's posts as well.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, but Cook had been on the seas for 20+ years before the famed "First Voyage of James Cook" started in 1768, and he didn't initiate that voyage himself - he was commissioned by the Royal Navy and Royal Society. So, that voyage was not a snot-nosed young adventurer jumping into hazard. It was a seasoned professional and military officer being ordered to do it.

So, he'd been on the seas, presumably traveling to various places, for 20 years? And this is your counter evidence that people with normal home lives would never leave their homes?

It would be really nice if just once an example could be used and people address the point being made instead of nit-picking the example. Or, if the example isn't particularly apt because it was a mostly off the cuff remark and not the actual point being made, perhaps suggest a better example instead of wasting a bunch of time nit picking the example (and of course, completely ignoring the other example) and actually address the point being made which is that people do not need to come from broken homes to become adventurers AT ALL.

I mean, good grief, Nelly Bly traveled around the world in less than 80 days, alone, in the late 1900's. Ibn Batutta (sp) traveled around the known world for years - a wealthy lawyer from a by all accounts loving family in the what, 12th century (working from memory here, might have the date wrong). It's not like all or even most of those who hear the call to adventure have to come from heart breaking histories.